A Quote by Sonya Walger

I think the world's a little smaller these days. With the Internet and the availability of people, the pool of English speaking actors - not just American actors, but Brits, Australians, New Zealanders, Irish. We're all up for grabs.
If you just compare South Africans to the rest of the world, I think that white South Africans, and especially English-speaking white South Africans, are exactly the same as Brits or Australians or New Zealanders or Canadians or Americans.
People have asked me why are Australians and Brits so good at American accents, and it's quite simple. We grew up listening to the American sound on our TV. That's why American actors have a hard time with foreign accents.
I think the film and TV industry - the acting world - has a tendency to attract a lot of people for the wrong reasons; reasons that are less than artistic. It has a tendency to be pretty superficial, and pretty shallow and fake. I think what New Zealanders and Australians - and the English, I guess - have to offer is that we don't carry a lot of that baggage. We come over and we're pretty grounded. But on the flip side of that, you end up in a very unfamiliar environment being treated in a way that's a little bit surreal.
I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.
I think people saw him as someone who did good things for Ireland. If you looked at all the Irish actors in 'Excalibur' alone - Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson - there was a whole gaggle of Irish actors who've gone on to become stars, so Dad was really part of that.
New Zealanders are so chill. I know they say Australians are chill, and I feel like Australians are chill, but I keep thinking, "If they get drunk, they would commit a hate crime." Now that is an extreme position to take, but it's just a feeling I get. New Zealand people, I don't see that.
Film just chews up actors like nobody's business, and I'm not particularly interested in being chewed up. I think the camera can only look at somebody's face for so long. I guess you have to accept the roles you think are right at the time. You can build a career, but these days there doesn't seem to be that much interest in people being actors.
It's a phenomenon that I see with young actors - a lot of American speaking parts going to British actors.
James Joyce's English was based on the rhythm of the Irish language. He wrote things that shocked English language speakers but he was thinking in Gaelic. I've sung songs that if they were in English, would have been banned too. The psyche of the Irish language is completely different to the English-speaking world.
English actors feel vaguely apologetic for being there at all. American actors know that the most important thing is to get one take out of fifty that is great, and they'll go to any length to get it. The English are used to working within consistently small, low-budget things and think, I mustn't waste their time.
Often you find actors have big hearts; they're quite emotional people. Talking to actors who date other actors, and talking to people who deal with other actors, they often get emotionally caught up in lots of different things. They often wear their hearts on their sleeves. They feel things quite a lot - often to the nth degree, which I can imagine could make it quite difficult to date some of us. I think it's about having an emotional availability that you can kind of draw on. But I'm also searching for that. I'll be searching for the answer to that question for the rest of my life.
I think in the past, around the time that method acting became so prevalent, it used to be that American actors were thought to be the kind that would work more from the inside out, and that the English actors worked more from the outside in.
If you're lucky enough to work with great actors and creative people, they're always just going to be who they are, so I don't think there's a difference between the Brits and the Americans.
There are lots of actors who insist on speaking the lines themselves, and you hear the same thing from directors and the audience, but I don't think it's worth getting het up about. I think it makes more sense to use someone who speaks that country's language: that's what voice actors are for.
Eventually, in '84, we made a film for a little over a million dollars - with American actors that was shot in English - that was shown in Finland A little action film called Born American.
It takes awhile for writers to get to know actors rhythms, not just as actors, but what they bring to the characters. I think it takes a few episodes for the writing room to catch up to the actors and vice versa.
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